OWEN AND EVOLUTION IN 1881 29 



end. How completely he abandoned it, and how 

 sharp was the contrast between him and a still 

 surviving warrior of the * Old Guard ', remains as 

 one of my earliest and clearest memories of the 

 scientific world. The stage was the meeting of 

 the British Association at York, in 1881, when 

 Prof. O. C. Marsh described the Berlin skeleton 

 of Archaeopteryx. The lizard-like characteristics 

 of the earlier fossil in the British Museum- 

 bought, it was said, at the price of a dowry for a 

 professor's daughter were far more clearly 

 displayed in the later find. Prof. Marsh told me 

 that he would have given almost any sum to 

 secure this probably the most valuable and 

 interesting fossil in the world for the museum 

 at Yale. ' I dare not do it,' was the reply. ' We 

 let the other go, and I really believe they would 

 kill me if I sold this one.' So Prof. Marsh, 

 obliged to study the wonderful ancestral bird in 

 Berlin, came, fresh from his work, to tell us 

 about it at York. 



Owen, presiding over the zoological section at 

 which the paper was read, seemed quite enthu- 

 siastic over Archaeopteryx, and had not a word of 

 criticism for the evolutionary history which it 

 unfolded. He discoursed sweetly upon the teeth, 

 believed to have been discovered in embryonic 

 parrots, and, with his suave manner and venerable 

 appearance, created a very pleasant impression. 

 An entirely different scene was enacted, a day or 

 two later, in the geological section, where Prof. 



